Pynchon's Back!

[davemarc]

The current issue of New York (November 11, 1996) includes an article by
Nancy Jo Sales entitled "Peeping at Tom."  Apparently it wasn't hard to find
P. in NYC using an Internet directory.  While there's little "new" info in
the article, there are some items that deserve mention, including a blurry
picture of an adult and child walking away along a sidewalk, accompanied by
the caption "Pynchon and son on a street near you."   Apparently the
toddler's name is Jackson.  

Here's a description of the Author Himself:  "He'll be 60 next year, and his
hair has gone gray.  He keeps it long, and has a white moustache and beard.
It appears that his famous snaggle of teeth has been fixed.  He wears
glasses.  His eyes, shadowed in dark in those few early photographs, are
blue....He has a light gait.  He floats along.  He looks canny and
whimsical, like he'd be fun to talk to....He's carrying his own shopping
bag, a canvas tote like one of those giveaways from public radio...."

Of P.'s current digs:  "Pynchon's neighborhood is a bustling, civil, and
prosperous one, with good subway access.  In the vicinity of his building,
there's a discount department store, a bagel ship, a church.  At the corner,
a man with a fruit-and-vegetable stand sells broccoli and bananas.

"The building itself is stately, if gritty.  It could use a sandblasting.  A
rumpled doorman sits on a folding chair by the entrance, watching the people
outside pass....The neighborhood is New York at its finest:  tolerant,
navigable, sane.  It's the New York that could almost lull one into
believing that broader American myth, the one Pynchon warns against in his
fiction:  All is right with the world."

At one point the focus turns briefly and awkwardly to the P-list:  "There
was even a rumor, hotly debated on the Pynchon Websites on the Internet,
that Thomas Pynchon was the Unabomber."

Apparently a few-to-several P-listers cooperated with the article.  I wonder
if any of them would like to post about the experience.

At present I'm not 100% clear on how one might obtain of New York after the
mag goes off the stands next Monday.  But maybe the following info will help:

New York Magazine
K-III Magazine Corporation
444 Madison Avenue
New York, NY  10022-6999
212-508-0700

Best,

davemarc